As a National Football League brand, the Denver Broncos have certainly seen better days, so it’s easy to understand why the team would turn to the enduring symbol from the franchise’s most halcyon era to drive an attempt to return to glory.

Last week’s announcement that John Elway, who retired from professional football 12 years ago after leading the Broncos to back-to-back Super Bowl victories, is returning to the team as executive vice president of football operations has certainly jazzed up a region eager to make sure the moribund seasons of the past few years are not repeated.

But while No. 7 was one of the greatest on-field leaders of all time, questions have been raised about his ability to quarterback the team from the executive offices.

Some of those questions stem from the fact that Elway’s experience running a team has been limited to football’s minors, the idled Arena Football League. Others point to a personal business background that has scored some touchdowns — but has suffered from a number of painful sacks too.

Elway, busy hiring the Broncos’ next coach and staff, was not available to comment for this story, a team spokesman said.

But Tim Schmidt, Elway’s partner in a pair of steakhouses in Cherry Creek and downtown Denver, said the path that Elway, 50, has taken in their venture, as well as throughout his football career, bodes well for his new job.

“The Broncos are a brand just like a restaurant and a car dealership, and no one understands that brand better than John Elway — the team is eponymous with his name,” Schmidt said. “In football, a brand is about winning games, but also about how your customer perceives you and relates to you as a business. He knows building that brand is about getting the customer base excited about the Denver Broncos again.”

Schmidt cited his partner’s attention to detail as they developed a plan for Elway’s steakhouses, in Cherry Creek and in The Ritz-Carlton Hotel downtown, as evidence that he has the chops to plot the Broncos’ future.

“He helped develop the menu; we went to Chicago for meetings on the design of the floors and ceilings. He was involved in the details of everything we did,” Schmidt said. “I helped him with the restaurant business and taught him about it, but who knows football better than him? His dad was a college coach, an NFL player personnel director, a scout. Like Tiger Woods, he was groomed from the time he was a 1-year-old to be the best at what he did, and he is.

“If you look at the Broncos, they’re a detail business — it’s scouring 2,000 players every year, it’s scouring what free agents are available. It’s details, details, details,” Schmidt said. “Elway’s has become one of the most successful startups ever in Colorado, and John was all in from Day One.”

Schmidt tells the story of how a rival steakhouse based out of Dallas opened in Cherry Creek, with ownership boasting that it would “bury” Elway’s.

“You should have seen the twinkle in John’s eye,” Schmidt said. “He loves the competitive side of it.”

But the same drive and determination that pushes athletes to the pinnacle of their sports can be hazardous in the business world, said Ed Butowsky, a Pennsylvania-based financial analyst who works with pro athletes and consults on money-management issues for many major sports leagues.

“A lot of guys, they’ll put money into an investment and if it doesn’t do well, they’ll put more money into it,” Butowsky said. “You can be as competitive as you want, but you’d better have the skill set to back it up. Just because John Elway went to Stanford doesn’t mean he knows how to manage money. You have to sit down and take lessons on how to do it right.”

Elway scored big in 1997, when he and partner Rod Buscher sold their seven-store chain of auto dealerships to Wayne Huizenga’s Republic Industries for $82.5 million in stock and cash. He remained the face of the AutoNation chain’s Denver-area stores until 2006.

But Elway’s other forays into the business world seemed more trial by fire: MVP.com, an online sports retail venture with fellow superstars Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky, fizzled in 1999, within a year of its start; he managed to salvage his major investment in the Hispanic Internet portal Quepasa.com before it began to list.

He and then-Broncos head coach Mike Shanahan invested heavily in Laundromax, a luxe laundry chain with franchise aspirations. Elway loaned his name to market the franchises, but the business failed within two years.

Place the Elway’s eateries and a burgeoning month-old Greeley auto dealership — a 25,000-square-foot operation — in the win column.

But there have been other missteps. In October, court documents revealed Elway and Mitch Pierce, his partner in a California auto dealership, had lost $15 million in Cherry Hills Village hedge-fund manager Sean Mueller’s alleged Ponzi scheme seven months before.

“Everyone is responsible for their own actions, for what we do and what we learn and what we know,” Butowsky said. “But you can’t put him under a microscope and say, ‘Look, you idiot, you got taken advantage of in a Ponzi scheme.’

“We’re all out there trying to compete and to win, and you never know when you’re going to have somebody do something illegal and immoral.”

And while there are certainly plenty of wolves in the NFL eager to fleece the novice VP, Schmidt is betting that in the end, Elway will have the last laugh.

“I know CEOs who are so organized they want to organize the dishwasher at home,” he said. “It’s ingrained to be organized, to see the big picture. And John does both as well as anybody I’ve been around my whole life.

“So you throw a guy who is as meticulous as he is, understands branding like he does and is as competitive as he is,” Schmidt said, “how in the heck is there a better choice for this football team?”